teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk

WARNING! This website is no longer actively maintained. It is an archive of 2 years work by Doug Belshaw who now blogs at dougbelshaw.com...

Mind-mapping is something I’ve found goes down well with most students. It gives them a chance to organize their thoughts perhaps more in tune with how their mind processes - and brain thinks about - information. Here are some ideas about how to use mind-mapping both with and without using ICT…

I’ve only ever come across a couple of students who didn’t prefer mind-mapping as a way of organizing information to making notes. These were two AS-levels students who came to my lesson in a school different from their own due to VI Form teaching being spread across a consortium of institutions. They had been overly spoon-fed, meaning that they weren’t confident in organizing information the ‘right’ way. The fact that information can be organized in many different ways was not really a concept that they understood. In the end, due to the rushed nature of the course, I couldn’t really spend time weaning them from a reliance on making reams of written notes. The rest of the students, however, greatly enjoyed the chance to be more creative with the information with which they were presented. In fact, I should imagine that these students would be the ones who would ‘take’ to collaborative and less structured activities such as blogging, wiki creation and the like.

Mind-mapping shouldn’t be a wholly unstructured activity, however. There are some guidelines which you can use with students to help them to their best:

Colour - memorable mind-maps use colour to good effect. For optimum results, colour should not be used at random, but should be planned (perhaps even with a key). This can always be put on at the end once the information has been put onto the mind-map by adding ‘bubbles’ around certain bits of information.

Layout - there are different ways of setting mind-maps out and some may be more intuitive or work better with different students.

a) There is the classic ’spider diagram’ which can be used to divide a key question off into key themes or ideas, and then more detail the further out from the ’spider’s body’ you go.

b) There’s the hierarchical view (either top-down or side-on) which makes it easier to see which topics/ideas/details are on the same ‘level’.

c) Although perhaps more strictly a Venn diagram, large overlapping circles can be drawn which encourages students to create links between the detail they enter. The drawback with this that, if the circles are drawn before the information is entered it can sometimes get a bit cramped in some areas with massive spaces in others.

d) The Learning Performance Seminar that I sat in today when covering Year 9 featured mind-mapping. The mind-map the seminar leader asked students to produce had main ideas coming off the main theme, with details coming off those. Pictures, symbols and words were used (as well as colour) but the interesting thing was his insistence that the words had to go along the line which signified the idea or concept:

 (click to enlarge)

Connectors - the types of lines drawn between different pieces of information can signify various things on a mind-map. Encourage students to use arrow to signify the flow of ideas and the ‘logical flow’ of concepts. Lines should be thicker or thinner depending on the strength of the link between the two ideas, and these can be linked to as many ideas as possible!

Symbols - as the mind-map you askxstudents to produce will be for their own personal benefit, any symbols or small pictures they wish to use which help them connect ideas together can be used. It doesn’t really matter how bizarre the connection is - in fact, in some cases the stranger the better! (they’re more likely to remember it…)

There are a number of mind-mapping products available for Windows, Mac and Linux. They can vary in quality and price with most of them being discussed on the relevant Wikipedia page. I’m going to introduce three software programs with which I’ve had experience: Inspiration, CmapTools, and Freemind.

Inspiration is a commercial product with excellent ease-of-use and integration with Microsoft Office. it comes with a 30-day free trial so you can test it out for yourself before deciding to buy for personal or institutional use. Others I have spoken to about this program have been overwhelmingly positive about it. The downside, of course, is its cost, but if your present this in the correct way (i.e. cross-curricular learning enhancement) then there’s no reason why you can’t get it installed on your school’s network. It’s also available for purchase with E-Learning Credits…

CMap Tools is a program made by the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC) and is freeware. This is the mind-mapping tool that I use and it’s available for Windows, Mac & Linux computers!

Some people swear by Freemind, but I’ve never really got the hang of it. Apparently once you get use to its interface it becomes second-nature and is an extremely powerful tool. Give it a try - it’s free, open-source and cross-platform (Java-based).

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